‘Big Beautiful Bill’ has uglier pieces

As the Labor Paper reported in April, H.R. 1 – the budget measure Republicans named the “Big Beautiful Bill” in fealty to Trump’s complimentary comment – would gut Medicaid and food assistance for millions of Americans.

President Trump and the GOP want to extend Trump’s 2017’s “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” that mostly enriched the wealthy and big corporations – action that would add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The highest-income households (the top 5%) would receive more than 45% of the benefits if expiring parts of the 2017 tax cuts are extended, says the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

A ”reverse Robin Hood” stealing from the poor to give to the rich, the bill would raise taxes on Americans earning under $15,000 in 2027, according to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation. By 2029 and thereafter, the bill would continue to increase taxes on them, plus people earning between $15,000 and $30,000 a year.

The 1,116-page bill would increase the incomes of the top 1% by nearly $70,000 in the first year, giving that elite a collective $124 billion tax cut, according to Penn Wharton, but reduce by 4% the take-home incomes of the bottom 10% of income earners by the end of the decade, according to CBO.

If the bill passes the Senate, 14 million individuals may lose health coverage, while about 2.7 million households may go without food assistance, says Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group. The Urban Institute says that would mean their monthly grocery budgets would fall $254.

“The House Republicans’ bill is a budget for the billionaires,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “While this leadership has tried to claim they’re the party of workers, they are pushing forward a bill that will cause historic levels of harm to working families.

“It will throw millions of children, seniors and families off their health care, gut funding for nursing homes and rural hospitals, cut investments in jobs of the future, and push food assistance out of reach—all to give the rich and big corporations another tax cut.”

In West Central Illinois, thousands of residents represented by two Republicans who voted for the House bill could be hurt. According to ACASignups.net, 139,015 residents in Rep. Darin LaHood’s 16th District receive Medicaid, and 174,085 Medicaid recipients are in Mary Miller’s 15th District.

Health-care cuts in the measure would lead to an additional 51,000 deaths, according to a study from professors at the Yale University School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Health Economics.

 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Beyond these devastating effects, the bill’s final form passed by the House on May 22 (by one vote) has a host of other proposals threatening Americans.

“It can be difficult to wrap your mind around these changes because the GOP legislation calls for not one big transformation but a bunch of smaller ones,” wrote Jonathan Cohn of The Breakdown newsletter.

Virtually everyone faces dire consequences from some of these provisions:

 

Health coverage

Adding an 80-hour monthly work requirement for Medicaid eligibility would “save money” by discouraging participation by some avoiding new hoops to jump through, and if otherwise needy citizens are removed from Medicaid, they’d also lose coverage from the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). The CBO says 10.3  million Americans could lose coverage.

The Affordable Care Act also would have new red tape imposed and subsidies dropped, creating a loss of health coverage for many Americans.

Medicare is in jeopardy, too, according to Marketwatch.

“Because the massive debt increase in the measure triggers a 2010 law requiring offsets, [so] it will cut Medicare, as well, by an estimated $500 billion,” explained historian Heather Cox Richardson.

Drew Altman, president of the health research organization KFF, added, “Proportionately, that’s a much bigger enrollment and coverage loss than projected for Medicaid.”

 

Federal workers

H.R. 1 would force federal workers who haven’t already been laid off to become “at-will” workers who can be discharged at any time, or to retain their current protections but sacrifice retirement provisions to keep their civil service job.

"It really amounts to charging people for their basic rights," said Daniel Horowitz, the legislative director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 820,000 government workers.

AFGE said the provision is "un-American, anti-union [and] morally bankrupt. If enacted, this change will lead to the eventual extinction of the merit-based, nonpartisan civil service, which is certainly its true purpose."

 

The courts

The bill would create a new hurdle for filing lawsuits, mandating a bond be paid in order to sue. A related proposal would block any funding to enforce contempt of court orders, which would shield a defendant, whether a big corporation or the President, from judicial orders.

It’s a “terrible” idea, said Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law:

“This provision is meant to limit the power of federal courts to use their contempt power,” he said. “It does so by relying on a relatively rarely used provision of the Rules that govern civil cases in federal court. Rule 65(c) says that judges may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order ‘only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained’.”

 

Universities

The bill would raise taxes on universities. For example, Harvard would have an increase from the 1.4% tax it pays on its endowment’s earnings to 21%.

 

Ensuring generational wealth

The measure would sweeten a gift to the rich, the estate-tax exemption. It has been a way to leave up to $27 million to descendants without paying a cent in taxes, but that would increase to $30 million.

Americans for Tax Fairness said, “This handout to lucky heirs and heiresses will cost over $200 billion in lost revenue over 10 years.”

 

Another perk for the rich

The bill would quadruple tax breaks tied to home values, which “overwhelmingly benefits wealthy, white households,” according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

 

Exploiting the environment

The measure would weaken environmental protections in several ways, including opening up national forests to logging; allowing mining, drilling and other extraction on public lands; ending tax incentives for vehicle efficiency and clean-energy initiatives; and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, halting the United States’ involvement in climate-change solutions.

 

Stroking the President’s ego

The bill would rename the Treasury Department’s holdover savings program from Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement (MAGA) to “Trump Accounts.”

 

Schools

The measure would eliminate the Dept. of Education, but create a back-door subsidy for private schools’ vouchers by changing what’s now a tax deduction to a tax credit.

 

No AI protections

The bill would prohibit states from regulating Artificial Intelligence.

 

In the Senate, the bill faces a White House deadline of July 4 for passage.

“Any member of Congress who votes for this bill is voting to betray the working people of this country,” Shuler added, “—and  we won’t forget it.”